


loving you is a losing game

by inmylife



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Hurt No Comfort, M/M, No Dialogue, Not Actually Unrequited Love, sasha assigns the assistants parks and rec kin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-11
Updated: 2020-05-11
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:13:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24121141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inmylife/pseuds/inmylife
Summary: please carry me carry me carry me home(or, Jonathan Sims will never ever love him back)
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 8
Kudos: 84





	loving you is a losing game

**Author's Note:**

> title is from arcade by duncan laurence
> 
> set pre or during s1. no worms here just some good old-fashioned martin angst!

Martin Blackwood can’t deny that he’s unlovable. 

His mom sure thinks so. The guy he’d asked out in grade school had said so. His ex-boyfriends would agree. Tim and Sasha… well, he thinks they just tolerate him. 

And Jon. Yeah, Jon definitely thinks Martin’s beyond saving. It shows with every cutting comment he makes under his breath that he thinks Martin can’t hear (or maybe he knows Martin can hear him, and just doesn’t care); it shows with every irritated sigh and with every eye roll that puts Martin in mind of a petulant teenager. It shows with the cups of tea gone cold at the edge of the thicket of papers that Jon calls a desk. 

And Martin is _lonely_. Growing up he told himself that everything would be better someday, that someday someone would be there to hold him in the night and make that empty feeling in the pit of his stomach go away. That’s what got him through the nights when he was fourteen, nineteen, twenty-two. But Martin’s nearly thirty now and he’s starting to give up on ever being held. To give up on loving little touches and playful, shy smiles and someone on the other side of the bed at night who’s still there in the morning. Yeah, he still lulls himself to sleep at night imagining what it might be like to be with Jon. He imagines what a smile on Jon’s face might look like, what Jon’s voice might sound like when it’s not harried or curt. He imagines the text messages and how he’d save Jon’s contact name if things were different (instead of being just “Jon from work”), he imagines holding hands and kissing and what he’d post on social media. But it hurts because he knows Jon would never look at him that way. No one will ever look at Martin Blackwood that way. 

He wonders sometimes if he’s addicted to that hurting. Martin has made a career out of hurting over people who would never even see him as a friend. Because people never even do that; to most people Martin Blackwood is an acquaintance, either gossiped about or forgotten. (He’d rather be forgotten.) No one ever wants to stay for long. 

Martin’s dated a couple of times. It’s never ended well. All he wants is for people to stay because he’s so _terrified_ of being alone - of dying alone - of hurting alone - and so he lies and he lies, and eventually he makes one misstep and it all falls apart. One ex-boyfriend called him manipulative. Martin doesn’t try to be - all Martin tries to be is _enough_. 

The day is going to come where someone finds out that Martin lied on his CV, and his life at the Archives will come crashing down around him. He will lose his job, he will lose the shaky trust he’s built with Tim and Sasha, and he will lose seeing Jon every day. 

As much as Jon hates Martin, as much as he’s made that perfectly clear, Martin loves seeing Jon anyway. He brings Jon tea because he wants to. He knows it won’t help. Jon’s made up his mind about Martin. But he wants to see Jon nonetheless, he almost relishes the little pull in his stomach when their eyes meet, the electric jump of nervousness in his veins. And then Jon is unkind, as he always is, and Martin goes home and stays up until 2 in the morning staring at the ceiling and coming to terms with the dull fact that it’s all his fault, maybe there’s something he can do to fix it but Jon will never love him like that, Martin just isn’t enough.

One time, Sasha had invited him over to her place to have dinner and watch TV with her and Tim. They’d ordered takeaway and put on Parks and Rec, because Tim has Netflix. Sasha, for fun, had started saying which characters were most like their colleagues at the Institute. Jon was Ron Swanson, of course. Tim was Tom. Sasha, of course, was Leslie. Rosie from upstairs was Donna, and none of them knew enough about Elias, Jon’s boss, to assign him to anyone. 

Martin was Jerry Gergich. 

Jerry was clumsy. He knocked things over and somehow always did the wrong thing. He was universally hated by his coworkers. The comparison stung. It stung even more because Jerry seemed to have it all outside of work - he had a wife and kids, a loving family, and the constant humiliation from his coworkers never seemed to bother him. Martin knows it’s stupid to envy a fictional character, but he envied him. Martin knows Sasha and Tim were just having a bit of fun, but he’d had to step out of the room. 

Sasha’d tried to comfort him. She’d said that Jerry was actually loved by his coworkers, it becomes clear later on if you watch, Martin, see? We should make this a regular thing, you and me and Tim, it’s fun and I like seeing you outside of work when Jon’s not here to harp on us. I didn’t mean to upset you, Martin, I’m sorry, you can be… you can be… you can be Ann Perkins! 

While Sasha struggled and hesitated and racked her brain for another character Martin might be, Martin had swallowed back the lump in his throat and blinked the forming tears away. He took a deep breath, and he went back to Sasha’s living room, and he spent the rest of the evening sitting just a little apart on the couch. 

He still goes over to Sasha’s, or occasionally now to Tim’s, to watch this show. He thinks that Sasha maybe instigated this because she felt bad about what had happened the first time and is determined for Martin to see that everything works out for Jerry at the end. He doesn’t mind, really. He thinks that, given time (given his lie holds up long enough), he could become friends with them, really friends. He could become someone around them who can say something whenever a gag onscreen is instantly followed by Tim saying Hey, remember that one time when Martin… . Tim doesn’t mean it, Martin knows that, but he hasn’t been on inviting-each-other-places with Tim and Sasha long enough to say it bothers him. 

Tim and Sasha might become true, real friends in time. He allows himself to be hopeful about that. He daydreams about that, too. Jon, though… Martin has long given up any hope of that becoming real. Martin Blackwood simply will never be loved that way. He knows it to be true. 

And yet he likes Jon anyway. If he knew any better he would find a job somewhere else, stop putting himself through the agony of Jon’s harsh words every day, find somewhere he could be just another face. Martin doesn’t do that, and he doesn’t think he’s going to. No, he’s going to stay at the Magnus Institute, going on wild goose chases (or wild ghost chases, as it were), with the only positive human contact he has some days being phone conversations with retired old ladies and the smile he gets from the barista at the coffee shop in the morning. He stays because he likes Jon, even though Jon will never like him back. And he keeps going home at night and lying awake in bed and staving off the waves of sadness crashing on his shore by imagining what it might be like to be loved by Jonathan Sims. He keeps forcing a smile through all his failures, all his mistakes. He keeps pushing forward even though it hurts because there’s a little tiny part of him that believes that if he just keeps pushing and lying and trying Jon might just come around, even though the rest of him’s given up long ago. He gets by. He tries to get by. 

Not, of course, that anything will ever come of it.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks as always to ted, the jon to my martin. i am forever thankful you see something in me worth loving. also you're the reason i listened to tma, so.


End file.
